Because it´s been too long, this blog is too long...

Words are extremely powerful. They can do just about anything, start wars, build friendships, make money, and fill silences. You all know this, but you probably wouldn´t be able to guess correctly if I asked you to identify my current selection for most powerful words. Money? no. Family? no. Jesus? no. Love? no.


BANANA! Yes. These six letters are borderline magical, because they manage to conjure the image of a nice fruit, good with breakfast or in milkshakes, while burying the dirty, sweaty, slimy, machete-wielding truth.



I have encountered this truth, and am lucky to have the opportunity to expose it. Having been through so much to bring you this ¨boots on the ground¨coverage, I ask only that you listen. (There will be no opportunity for laughter.)


The Spanish word for bananas is chiefly platano, though here there are three names, plateno, guineo, and rulo, to denote the three varieties grown here. (Platanos are longer, guineos shorter and fatter, and rulos, my favorite, are by far the most suave, and are rumored to help diabetes.)



I find these names to be 1000 times more accurate than banana, not only due to the existence of more than one variety, but also because they are strong and intimidating, like the plant itself.


Calling this plant, which has been responsible for, among other things, WTO free-trade lawsuits, rainforest destruction, the overthrow of Guatemalan President Daniel Arbenz, a Gwen Stefani song, the soreness in my shoulders, and the domination of the lives of millions of tropical farmers, bananas, is like calling Antartica ¨Cabo San Lucas¨or re-naming racism ¨color-shyness.¨


For starters, there is the actual process of plantings and growing platenos, which I have been experiencing (suffering) first hand. There is no tossing of seeds into machine prepared earth involved in this. Instead there are sepas. These are the trunks of secondary and tertiary offshoots from a mature plant. (Just to give you a picture, the platano ¨tree¨is anywhere from 8 to 12 ft tall, witha soft, water filled trunk topped by wide and long leaves.) The offshoots can be anywhere from 2 to 8 feet tall at the time of sepa harvesting.


To obtain sepas, a farmer talks to another who happens to have a field already planted with mature platanos, and negotiates a per sepa price. As an example, our price was 1.5 pesos per sepa, which is around 4 cents US. He then gathers a crew of workers and an innocent and unsuspecting American kid who´s excited to ¨play with bananas¨and heads to said field so early in the morning that God is still asleep. The jopb starts with going around and digging up the trunks with a tool I would describe as a pick-shovel. This is particularily challenging considering the constant muddy star of the ground between the rows of the ¨banana forest¨.



Once uprooted, the work is divided into two parts, cleaning and carrying. Cleaning involves chopping the sepas down to size and removing chunks of worm-infested flesh with a machete. (Note, ¨to-size¨is very general, as some sepas are fist-sized and others are double Jon Atwell head size.)


Hauling involves going around and filling plastic rice sacks with sepas, shouldering them, and stumbling out through the swampish field complete with giant unseen spider webs and leaves that seems to intentionally slap people. The sacks, about 3 to 4 ft tall and weighing more than 100 lbs, are then dumped at the corner of the field closest to the path.


As my time machete in hand is restricted, on the (correct) assumption that sooner or later I will chop a finger, or hand, off, I was assigned to hauling. I don´t know how many sacks we filled, but time passed, and soon it was lunch. Platenos with spaghetti, 100% energy, but heavy on the stomach. We struggled onwards, and finished the first step of the process, so tired that we only had energy to hunt mangos for 10 mins.


Then came the next part, more hauling. Some farmers spring for trucks, others borrow horses, and some combine the two. Because we had collected sepas from 2 separate fields, one miles away from ours, and the other half a mile, we used a truck for one and a horse for the other. Filling the sacks and dumping them out at the edge of our field.


I was assigned to horse duty, which meant loading Gringo (which I named him for his white color) down with saddle bags first and two or three sacks on top, walking alongside to catch anything that fell. Just for kicks sometimes we´d shoulder a sack ourselves, showing solidarity with the Dominican stallion.


The sepas, after sitting out overnight, become slimy and slippery, and the fluids unexplicadly sting one´s cuticles. Thankfully this step is short, lasting only a half day. I had enough energy to find a more standard 8ish mangos and triumphantly rode Gringo back into town, finding the straw saddle surprisingly comfortable.


Step three, more hauling, though this time is is ¨al hombre¨whihc means Gringo got a day off. Maddeningly, we once aghain re-filled the sacks, begging the question ¨why not find more sacs and leave them filled?¨Yet such logic can not be applied to such an illogically powerful plant, so we loaded and hauled, this time dumping the sacks at intervals along the edge of the field.


Finally comes the big day, planting. The workers leave early, waking the roosters up on their way out, pocketing tiny flasks of coffee and carrying old liter soda bottles of water. The morning chill calls for long sleeves, but those are soon shed. Planting involves a horse and plow to dig furrows. The horseman pushes down hard on the plow while the horse pulls slowly, obeying the whip and the three principal ¨commands¨of ¨Diablo!¨Cono!¨and ¨Haitiano!¨ Behind them follow the rest, carrying the sepas and dumping one into the furrow at an interval of 4 feet. After covering the whole field, the workers go through and position the sepas in the best way possible, so they grow upwards. Then the horse and plow come through again to cover the sepas in dirt, and where needed hoes are used to patch up. Then they wait, and weed, until the plants gorw tall enough to sustain themselves and shade out weeds. It takes more than a year for them to produce fruit, and they can be left in production for almost three years at times. Harvesting involves chopping off the bunches, which are about the same size as a sack of sepas, and hauling them off to market.


Platanos are not eaten as a fruit here. They are a staple food, eaten unripened and plain. Producing them seems to be popular in the village right now, which means soon it won´t be. The farmers seems to follow each other, and in doing so flood the local market with the same commodity, sending the prices down and forcing them to plant something else. (at least it causes crop rotation, a positive side-effect.)



One thing that doesn´t change is the nature of the work. This living is made and maintained by hand and sweat. You can´t imagine the intensity of the labor. I´m slowly getting accustomed to what I´ve privately termed ¨bacon labor.¨ (Bacon because a day in the field is like being a piece of bacon. You enter the frying pan, not yet heated up, happy to get out of the package and slide around a bit. Then the surface starts reaching higher temperatures and you start to lose fluids. You turn around a bit, drink water, have lunch, but you can´t avoid the inevitable result of being a shriveled and sad version of your morning self. The main flaw in this analogy is that bacon is tasty at the end. The workers, dirty, grimy, and weak, are not!)



This, from what I can see, can have two different effects, A lifetime of this work either leaves people older looking than normal, or as uincredibly sprightly ancients. The work either defeats their backs, or they grow stronger. A test of Darwinian fitness perhaps. One that few of the villagers have chosen but nearly all experience. The concept of retirement must have been introduced to the local dialect by the tv, as I know of at least three 90 year olds still working in the field. With my ¨retirement¨ approaching fast, I can´t imagine having to look forward to 1000s more days of ¨playing with bananas.¨



Then there are the wider impacts of this fruit. Although the bananas we eat in the US don´t come from this village, they do come at a great impact on the lives of similar people. Our giant transnationals such as Dole and Chiquita (which in Latin America is at times has been referred to as ¨the octopus¨due to its tenticles reaching offices of power and tiny villages alike.) wield incredible power over happenings. They own huge tracts of land, often times letting it sit unused, while pushing landless peasants further into to the rainforests at the expense of the world´s health, and not to sound conspiracy theorist, meddling in governmental affairs.

Tiny nations such as St. Vincent and the Grenadines are based on economies almost entirely dependent on banana exports to Europe. Yet, a US lawsuit filed in the WTO and backed by several large US fruit companies, complained that the favoritism the countries of the SEM (Single European Market) had been showing towards their former colonies in Latin America and Africa were in violation of internation free trade policies. Even though no US jobs were at stake, the US argued that protecting banana imports from tiny countries such as St Vincent discriminates unfairly against US companies. While they were meant to hold back US transnational dominance, the policies of lower tariffs and quotas were primarily meant as a form of aid and support to these impoverished countries.

This suit happened in the late 90´s and ruled in favor of the US, but I do not know the current state of affairs in the affected areas. That being said, the effect on the economies of the Windward Islands (St Vincent etc), whose 1992 total exports were over 50% bananas, and coming from small farmers (40% of land holdings of 10 acres or less), of direct and ¨fair¨competition with the economies of scale and deep pockets of ¨the Octopus¨, is obvious. (figures from Grossman, 1998)

These small farmers, just like those here in Los Toros, work by hand and earn very little money. I can´t imagine the scene there when the ruling came through. Hauling and digging and frying. A lifetime of this, to try and scratch together a living, only to have your tiny economy squashed by the Trade Liberalization Gospel, is sad. It is a well sung gospel that promises a lot, but the invisible hand seems to bring little in terms of equality. Maybe the non'existent hand is a better name. It is all very deflating to think about, especially knowing what it´s like to work so hard on the edge of poverty.

Earlier I referenced the 1954 overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala. Like many things in history, I cannot be 100% positive that this is how it played out. I´ll tell you what I know, and let you decide whether or not BANANAS had anything to do with it. When Arbenz came to power in 1950 by fair elections on a platform of Agrarian reform, United Fruit Company (later renamed Chiquits Brands) was the largest landowner in Guatemala, with 565,000 acres and only 9 percent of that in use. With 75% of peasant families landless, Arbenz set about expropriating land and paid $6,000,000 US to UFC for 413,000 acres, paying the value UFC had stated. Soon 100,000 peasants had title to land and Arbenz was extremely popular. Similar movements began picking up in Costa Rica and Honduras, both UFC strongholds.

The then US secretary of State John Dulles, was a senior partner in Sullivan and Cromwell Law Firm, UFC´s legal agent, and his brother Allen was the CIA chief. At the same time, the Cold Wat fever and suspicion being spurred on by the Eisenhower Administration (VP Nixon) was wary of any type of movement for the opressed, something that is a theoretical part of communist ideals. Throw in the fact that Arbenz, not a communist, has several members of the communist party in his government, and this all spelled trouble.

The CIA either believed, or was simply able to justify, that Arbenz and his reforms at the expense of UFC were communist attacks on US capitalism. In 1954, the CIA backed Guatemalan colonel Castillo Armas and his 300 man army, with propaganda and pledged US miliotary support against Arbenz. To top it off, CIA planes bombed the capital city, causing a panic. Arbenz, in spite of popular support, stepped down out of fear of a bloody coup. Bananas? You tell me!

To this day the large plantations of Chiquita and others continue to mass produce bananas and other fruits, while drenching the land in pesticides and pushing the small subsistence farmers to cut out plots in the the rainforests. This is why there is a book on the subject called ¨Breakfast of Biodiversity¨ To eat bananas from these companies is to eat the rainforest.

To sum it all up, this is a plant so powerful that it is responsible for international conflict, backbreaking work, and threats to the survival of planet earth. More powerful yet, is the word that disguises that power, BANANAS.

So there you have it. An explanation for my lawsuit to the High Court of the English Language, ATWELL V. BANANA, on the grounds of deception.

Bananas, in reality, are not as sweet as they sound.